Thursday, August 23, 2012

Scandinavia: The Liberal Anti-Semitic Sanctuary

Scandinavia: The Liberal Anti-Semitic SanctuaryBy Giulio Meotti Sweden, long famed as a shelter for U.S. draft resisters, Chilean dissidents and other exiles, has become one of the most anti-Semithic countries in the world.Several hundred kippah-wearing Jews and non-Jews just marched in Sweden as a sign of solidarity with Malmo’s Jews. Malmö, Sweden’s third largest city, the capital of the prosperous province of Scania, has 270.000 inhabitants. But the city has a population that is almost 40 percent foreign and the Jews are leaving the city due to attacks and harassment. In 1990, 2.000 Jewish people lived in Malmö; now there are fewer than 700.Earlier this year, a rabbi from Malmo was assaulted. In 2010, Malmo’s mayor, Ilmar Reepalu, said that a group of Jews who were attacked by local Muslims during a peaceful protest in support of Israel brought the attack upon themselves for not distancing themselves from Israel and Zionism.Have a look at Scandinavia, the locals say: we have eradicated wars, nationalism and religion; we do not wage war, we negotiate; we are the moral continent and we all want to make the world a better place. But anti-Zionism is spreading like a virus all over North Europe. Sweden has become “a center of anti-Semitism,” the president of the European Jewish Congress, Moshe Kantor, told last winter.Sweden is the ultra-secularized, ultra-liberal and anti-nationalistic beacon (the Danes are detested there as “chauvinists”), proud of its “lack of prejudice.” Sweden handled its Soviet neighbour with kid gloves and this is the country that the Guardian described as “the greatest success the world has known.” But anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism are the dark side of the “folkhemmet,” which in Swedish means “the house of all the people.” It’s the multicultural ideology on which Stockholm has built its model of integration.Sweden is a country that liked to call herself a “moral superpower” and where the welfare state pays for equipment for women who decide to change gender. But Jews have no future there. Sweden not only ranked among the world’s handful of richest countries, but also provided the world’s most lavish welfare state. It married solidarity to prosperity. But in the suburbs of the largest cities there are now “intifada against the police.” The Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet has even suggested that Israeli soldiers are transplanting organs from dead Palestinians. And the Swedish Parliament debated how to regulate the Jewish circumcision, the first restriction placed on the rite in Europe since the Nazi era. It’s the same liberal Swedish Parliament that didn’t have any moral problem in promoting eugenics, sterilization of the disabled.Norway is not better. During the Second World War, the German universities banned famous Jewish intellectuals such as T.W. Adorno and Albert Einstein. Last year, three universities in Norway turned down the Jewish lawyer and author Alan Dershowitz, who had offered free lectures on Israel and international law.Jews in Norway are just 0.003 percent of the total population, but Oslo is a bulwark of anti-Semitism and Israel-slandering. Norway is the paradise of political correctness, multiculturalism and anti-war feelings. It’s the country that, according to the Global Peace Index, tops the list of the most “peaceful” places in the world. Oslo is a founding member of the United Nations and the first UN Secretary General, Trygve Lie, was a Norwegian. The hallucinatory Oslo Accords, in which the Palestinian terrorists got guns and land, germinated in faraway fairybook Oslo. The United Nations placed Norway at the top of women’s rights and the Norwegians like to exercise their influence through international activism predicated on a collective vision of the global good society.But last year, Norway’s sovereign wealth fund (that administers the oil profits) divested from the Israeli company Elbit, because it has worked on the Israeli fence that blocked the suicide bombers. The author of the global literary phenomenon “Sophie’s World,” the national hero Jostein Gaarder, wished for the disappearance of Israel.Anti-Semitic cartoons are feautured in the mainstream newspapers. In the Norway’s largest newspaper Dagbladet, the former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert appeared as the leader of a Nazi death camp. Recently, another drawing was published by Dagbladet. Cartoonist Finn Graff depicted Palestinian prisoners being released for Gilad Shalit into another “prison” – Gaza, and inserted the Buchenwald insignia: “Jedem das Seine” (to each what he deserves).How it is possible that a country that calls itself “the peace nation,” the country of Ibsen, Munch, Nobel and Grieg, has become the sanctuary of anti-Israel hatred? Norway, the beautiful landscape and blond-and-white scenario of one of the richest countries in the world per capita, declared war on Zionism. This calm, liberal, peace-loving country of magnificent scenery, welfare state and smorgasbord, is in the top rank of nations in the number of books printed per capita and it is dedicated to encouraging democracy, responding to climate change and protecting human rights. But not the human rights of the Israeli citizens.In Scandinavia, liberal anti-Semites demonize Jewish nationalists, Jewish settlers and Jewish soldiers in place of Jewish usurers, Jewish capitalists, and Jewish communists. If in the past anti-Semites were uncultured and muscled, in Scandinavia they are flamboyant and ephebic.Scandinavia’s anti-Semites are denationalized and secularized, wishing mankind to “cast away the yoke of national prejudices” (Rousseau). They cast Zionism as a cause of anti-Semitism, not as a response to it. They see the bombing of a synagogue in Stockholm and Oslo as a reprisal for an incursion into Gaza.They play the “Hitler card.” They call the Israelis, Nazis. They see the Jewish State as seizing a Lebensraum for itself. They depict the Jews not as avaricious or dishonest like in the past, but as militarists and exclusivists.Their worldview, which nurtures anti-Israel hatred, is collectivist, internationalist, universalist and third-worldist. They see “Islamophobia” as the worst racism, while Judaism attracts their arrogant censure as savage, fanatical and ferocious. They are atheists, but they are ready to ally with theocrats of all kinds.Their phony progressive tolerance degenerates in sardonic contempt when it deals with Israel. Their cosmopolitanism cultivates the fantasy of somehow removing Israel and its people. They thrill to conspiracy fantasies, blood libels, and Holocaust perversion. Like Iran’s Ahmadinejad, they would wipe Israel off the map by their inks and papers.